Although at one time a novelty, today, wireless communication through the use of portable radio telephones is a widely accepted and, in fact, a commonplace means of communicating. Now that portable radio telephones are employed by virtually all population segments, the trend to make such devices smaller, lighter and more user friendly has taken center stage.
Clearly, the current trend is to produce portable radio telephones which are smaller and lighter than those previously offered. Phones by Motorola, Qualcomm and Ericsson have been reduced in size and weight, in part, through the use of hinged covers which not only offer keypad and LCD protection, but also reduce the distance between the microphone and speaker when the phone is not in use. Further, a hinged cover acts to prevent inadvertent activation when the portable radio telephone is either not in use or not on active status.
Although hinged covers offer certain functional advantages as noted above, such designs are not without their drawbacks. For example, a user would generally carry the portable radio telephone with the cover closed even if the phone has been activated to receive a call. However, because the cover obscures the LCD display, valuable information such as caller I.D. is not available to the user unless the hinged cover was opened. In most designs, opening of the cover acts to receive the call so that the option of avoiding a call based upon the caller I.D. display is lost to the user. Further, if one wished to use a jog dial to enter data or to scroll information contained within the portable radio telephone, one would again be required to flip the hinged cover from the telephone body in order to access the keypad and LCD.
Despite these drawbacks, the use of a hinged cover over the body of a portable radio telephone has become a universally acceptable design feature of the most modem of such devices. The hinged cover enables phones to be smaller than competitive phones created without this design feature. Besides the protective function provided by the hinged covers, auditory performance is also enhanced. In order to achieve adequate microphone performance, the microphone must be placed proximate the mouth of a user while the speaker is placed against the user's ear. Unless the hinged cover extends the microphone when the cover is drawn away from the telephone body, the microphone would simply not be in the appropriate position to pick up a user's voice during normal telephone operation. Some manufacturers have seen fit to take the approach of providing a microphone at the end of an extendable arm as a design alternative. However, this solution has not been well received because without the shielding provided by a hinged cover, background noise becomes an annoying intrusion.
It is thus an object of the present invention to provide a portable radio telephone employing a hinged cover which takes advantage of features that such a cover provides while substantially eliminating its drawbacks.
These and further objects of the present invention will be more readily appreciated when considering the following disclosure and appended claims.